As a big supporter of the marvellously stupid cable car I was naturally concerned and spent a whole handful of minutes on the interweb. So we amble to the original cable car planning application lodged with Newham council and gather a route picture, then off to London City Airport for the information on the Public Safety Zone (PSZ). Combining these mighty pictures with literally minutes of photoshop gives you;

Is it too late to call this a mashup? What's the Web 2.0 Service Pack 1 phrase I should be using?

As you can see the Zone of Death (aka where the cable car route crosses the Public Safety Zone), which is where the cable cars will be ‘at risk from City Airport planes’ is a tiny corner squeezed into the far end. Ohh and also includes the A1011 and the A1020 roads, but strangely they aren’t considered ‘at risk’ despite actually existing? Is it just that people don’t care if road users are killed when planes crash into them? While that may be true for Friends of the Earth I think this section of the Civil Aviation Authority site may be more relevant;

So in fact that Public Safety Zone is the proposed expansion and still hasn’t been confirmed? And the current one in fact stops in the middle of the Royal Victoria Dock? And as the cable car has planning permission it’s now treated the same as any other existing development? And the new PSZ is based on traffic forecasts that assume London City Airport gets to increase it’s traffic levels, so in fact the burden is on the CAA and London City Airport to prove that the new traffic levels (and new PSZ) won’t endanger the cable car and not the other way round? Well that’s a relief.

While I can understand why Friends of the Earth would do this, they were the people who fought a judicial review against London City Airports attempts to expand so any mud will do, why is the BBC so lazy? This was 5 minutes work on the internet, that lovely graphic took most of the time, surely BBC journalists can use search engines, so why don’t they?